All In a Day’s Work
I made a trip to Japan in December 2024, and one of the places I made a point to visit was the Wakayama Electric Railway's Kishigawa Line, and in particular Idakiso and Kishi Stations, where the famous stationmaster cats Niitama and Yontama were on duty.
In the gift shop, there were a pair of DVDs celebrating the first stationmaster cat, Tama, which I immediately picked up, thinking they'd be a fun source to use for a video.
My original thought was to use an instrumental version of "Sampo" from Totoro, since it had the striding quality that epitomizes how cats walk, but both versions of the song on the soundtrack had lyrics, so I went looking for other options. After trying a few other songs like the cat parts from "Peter and the Wolf," I came back to the Totoro soundtrack to see if another track might work. Finding "Lets Go to the Hospital" was both satisfying and frustrating, since it was the instrumental version of "Sampo" I was looking for in the first place that I had overlooked because of the title.
In choosing footage, I decided to focus on just Tama, which made a large portion of the DVDs difficult to use, as I wanted to avoid using footage that included her two assistants, Miiko and Chibi.
The video got a good reaction in RICE 2025, and was nominated as a finalist in the Palate Cleanser category.
Video - Tama and the Tama Train; Super Station Master Tama: Riding the Strawberry Wind
Audio - Joe Hisaishi - Let's Go to the Hospital
Completed January 2025
YouTube blocked the video due to the audio, but I can share it through Google Drive.